The Problem Isn’t That You Trust the Wrong People

It’s that you don’t trust yourself enough to believe what you’re already seeing

Issue 177, July 24, 2026 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

Have you ever looked back at a relationship and thought, I should have seen it coming?

Maybe it was a friend who repeatedly broke promises. A partner whose words and actions never quite matched. A coworker who kept taking credit for your work. Or someone who always had an explanation for why they couldn’t follow through, and somehow you always believed the next one would be different.

When it finally falls apart, it’s tempting to conclude, “I just trust people too easily.”

That’s certainly what I believed about myself.

One of the biggest revelations I had in recovery was realizing that I had been trusting untrustworthy people for most of my life. Then, when they inevitably disappointed me, I felt shocked and betrayed.

It seemed obvious that they were the problem.

But as I worked the steps and began looking honestly at my own patterns, I discovered something uncomfortable. The problem wasn’t just that I trusted the wrong people.

The problem was that I didn’t trust myself enough to believe what I was already seeing.

That changed everything.

I wasn’t missing the red flags. I was explaining them away.

For years, I thought I simply wasn’t good at reading people. Now I don’t think that’s true at all.

When I look back, I can remember repeatedly having moments when something felt off – like someone’s story didn’t quite add up or they regularly failed to do what they said they would do. Their behavior left me feeling confused or unsettled.

My body noticed. My intuition noticed. Reality noticed. The only one who didn’t want to believe it was me.

Instead, I explained it away.

“They’re just having a hard time.”

“They didn’t mean it.”

“Everyone deserves another chance.”

“I’m probably being too sensitive.”

Looking back, I wasn’t lacking information. I was lacking permission to trust what I already knew.

I thought loving people enough would make them different.

There was a time in my life when I believed that if I cared enough, gave enough, understood enough, or was patient enough, people would eventually become who I hoped they could be.

That’s a painful way to live because you’re constantly making decisions based on potential instead of patterns. When I heard someone in a recovery meeting say, “Why do I always fall in love with people’s potential??” I realized that was me.

One of my friends told me very early in our renewed friendship, “I’m late for everything. Don’t take it personally.” She wasn’t exaggerating.

At first, I adjusted. I padded the meeting time. I waited. I accommodated. Eventually, I became resentful. Not because she was late. Because I kept expecting someone who had shown me exactly who she was to suddenly become someone else.

The hardest part to admit was that she wasn’t actually betraying my expectations. She was living up to the pattern she’d shown me all along. I was the one refusing to believe it.

Self-trust isn’t believing you’re always right.

I think a lot of people misunderstand what self-trust actually is. 

It isn’t believing your perceptions are perfect, or assuming every uncomfortable feeling means you should walk away from a relationship. And it certainly isn’t becoming suspicious of everyone.

Self-trust is much simpler than that: It’s trusting that you won’t abandon yourself.

It’s trusting that when something consistently feels off, you’ll get curious instead of immediately talking yourself out of it. It’s trusting that you’ll ask hard questions instead of pretending everything is fine. It’s trusting that if someone disappoints you, you’ll be able to survive the disappointment.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s trusting that you’ll stay connected to yourself even when someone else doesn’t like your decision. That’s very different from believing you’ll always be right.

This is why boundaries changed my life.

People sometimes ask me how I learned to trust myself. The answer wasn’t positive affirmations or confidence exercises. It was building boundaries. Not because boundaries magically make other people trustworthy. They don’t.

Boundaries made me trustworthy to myself.

Every time I said no when I wanted to say no, I became a little more trusting of myself. Every time I stopped making someone else’s emotions the deciding factor, I trusted myself a little more.

Every time I spoke up instead of staying silent, honored my discomfort instead of explaining it away, or walked away from behavior that wasn’t acceptable to me, I was proving something important to myself.

I was proving that I would stay with me.

Over time, that changes your entire relationship with yourself. You stop wondering whether you’ll betray yourself to keep someone else comfortable. You already know the answer.

You don’t need more evidence.

One of the biggest shifts in my own life came when I stopped asking,

“Can I trust them?”

and started asking,

“Can I trust myself to respond to what I’m already seeing?”

Those are two very different questions. The first keeps your attention on someone else’s behavior. The second brings you back to the only person you can actually rely on – YOU.

The truth is, most of us don’t become trapped because we don’t have enough information. We become trapped because we override the information we already have. We mistake discomfort for danger or we convince ourselves we’re overreacting. We keep waiting for one more piece of evidence before we’ll finally believe what’s been true for a long time.

But self-trust begins the moment you’re willing to stop arguing with reality. It begins when you believe what you’re already seeing. And perhaps the greatest gift of all is this:

When you trust yourself to notice what you notice, say what needs to be said, and leave when something isn’t healthy, you stop needing certainty about other people.

You don’t become cynical. You become anchored. Because the person you’ve learned you can count on most…is you.

Want to go deeper?

This article is really about one question: Can I trust what I’m already seeing?

If this resonated with you, here are a few places to continue exploring:

If you’re ready to stop overriding yourself in real time, Boundaries That Hold: How to Stop Overriding Yourself in Real Time was created to help you build exactly this skill.

Download my free Internal Safety Resource Pack, which includes practical tools to help you stay connected to yourself when emotions are running high.